Accepting Abuse and Identifying how you mentally “Escape” Part 2 of 2:

Summary -How to make a change in your life, or away from an abusive partner? It starts with knowing your "Escape." This applies to anything a person is unhappy about and would like to change but does not.

In part one, we talked about how, in the case of continued abuse, what changes need to take place in order for the relationship to continue or it needs to be severed. I mentioned the conditions to forgiveness, but they are not always easy to do for people, especially the category in my book called “Blind support.”

Your "Escape" keeps you accepting abuse

Part of identifying continued abuse (or inconsiderate behavior) against you is identifying your “Escape.” Escapes play a very negative role in many people’s lives by not allowing them to create change.

Escapes are anything you do that gets in the way of your felt experience. That means is you are feeling bad, and are afraid to change, you will do something to distract yourself (or escape) from feeling that way. It is a way of diverting yourself from something unpleasant, that you feel cannot be changed.

Escapes often happen in the subconscious, you do them so automatically, often you don’t realize it. An escape could be anything. Typical escapes are drinking, drugs, smoking, gambling, watching TV, or video games. But they also are anything a person does excessively to alleviate the turmoil in their mind, such as gossiping, cleaning, reading, working too much, or anything done excessively.

Escapes prevent you from following through on taking action towards change. So if you have accepted continuous abuse, in your current relationship or from one relationship to the next, you can bet there are many escapes in place.

Know that if you are unhappy and you are not doing anything towards change, then escapes are prominent in your life, you just have to find them.

Now if you know you need to make a change but you feel you are not ready to do that yet, then try to choose your escape to be something healthy. This could be meditating or working out, taking a dance class, or anything that will benefit you in some way. – I often recommended this for people with anxiety as well. It’s a kind of “in the mean time” activity, keeping them away from doing something unhealthy while we work towards change.

The first step to do this though is to identify what your escape is, so that you can replace it. Identifying it also gives you an awareness that you are avoiding something that you would otherwise change.

Associated with your escape is your negative self-fulfilling prophecy. This is an insecurity that tells a person that they “can’t have anything better, so don’t bother changing anything.”This is something else that needs to change in order to motivate change in your life.

The process is as follows:

Inconsiderate behavior happens – The abusee automatically moves to escape because they feel they can’t have anything better, so instead of feeling bad about it, they create a distraction. This creates a cycle of acceptance of more and more abuse until resentment builds to the point of an explosion. After that they are either motivated to change or feel bad thye reacted so badly and go back for more abuse because of the negative self-fulfilling prophecy kicked in.

What we want to do is cut off the Escape right after the abuse happens and think about why you choose to accept that and how that can be stopped. Having awareness of why you accept it will point out a lot of things that will help you to create the change.

This could take some time. Don’t be judgmental about your process. Just don’t escape anymore in the way that you have been.

Modeling someone who has made great change in their life could be helpful to you.But once you know your escape, you can begin to stop distracting yourself with that and ask for the change you want from your partner or create something different in your life.

My book discusses more on how escapes are started, why people have them, and how to make a change by moving past them to before they become stronger.

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